Last month at Microsoft Ignite we introduced a new vision for intelligent communications, which includes Microsoft Teams becoming the primary client for communication and collaboration in Office 365. Today we are sharing more detail on our planned roadmap for adding Microsoft Skype for Business capabilities to Teams, so you can plan your onboarding.

Messaging – Teams offers rich instant messaging capabilities today, with persistent chat, as well as private 1:1 and group chat. We expect to deliver additional messaging capabilities in Teams by the end of Q2-2018. Features will include screen sharing during chat and federation between companies.

Meetings – Teams offers collaborative meetings capabilities today, including screen sharing, meeting chats captured in the channel after the meeting, and the preview of audio conferencing. We expect to deliver additional meeting capabilities in Microsoft Teams by the end of Q2-2018. These features include meeting room support with Skype Room Systems, and cloud video interoperability capabilities that allow third party meeting room devices to connect to Teams meetings.

Calling – Today, Teams offers many calling capabilities. Later this quarter, we plan to ship voicemail for Teams. By the end of Q2-2018, we will enable you to use your existing telco voice line to activate calling services in Office 365.

Beyond bringing existing Skype for Business core capabilities to Teams, we are excited about new intelligent communications coming to Teams. As shown at the Ignite Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business General Session, customers will be able to record a meeting and store it in Teams, have transcription added, and be able to search the meeting for key terms. These features will begin rolling out at the end of Q2-2018.

As part of our vision for intelligent communications, we are also taking the opportunity to simplify the naming of our premium communication offerings. PSTN Conferencing will now be known as “Audio Conferencing;” Cloud PBX will now be known as “Phone System;” and PSTN Calling will now be known as “Calling Plan.” We want these names to be more intuitive to both IT and end users as we further integrate communications with collaboration.

We encourage all customers who have not yet done so to start using Teams today, either stand alone or side-by-side with Skype for Business.

You can find a list of upcoming features on the Office 365 Public Roadmap. A downloadable version of the same roadmap is available on the Intelligent Communications FastTrack portal to further help plan your onboarding to Microsoft Teams.

Great roadmap but as usual the devil will be in the detail. Will existing federations be transferred from S4B? I heard that the presence engine for S4B and teams are separate items. Will presence be common across the entire platform?

Awesome stuff! I have an annoying question about a very particular feature, namely the ability to specify, when scheduling a meeting, that participants will not be able to share video, their own screen, audio, etc. This would be useful for one-to-many educational situations. I see that the ability to mute someone is coming, but am unsure if this is the same thing?

Also, I don’t see anything about if and when Skype for Business will be forcibly replaced by Teams? Can you say something like it won’t happen until mm/dd/yy at the earliest? This will make it easier for us to communicate the coming change with our organization (and frankly calm them down a bit).

Honestly I am very disappointed you are moving in this direction, I miss the days of a small simple interface like the old school Communicator, I want IM, Voice Call, Desktop share, to one or group, with conversations saved to my mail/server. All the 10 billion bloat features have their use but those are the features I use day in and out, I don't want or need a social network internally, even today Skype for Business makes half those items that use to be direct items two to three window clicks to do instead of a user list right click share desktop. We tried Slack and Teams, and it was fun for 30 minutes then it turned into a productivity drag, taking huge amounts of screen relestate, give us an option for a simple business use IM/call manager to save picking up phones, kicking off GoToMeeting etc.

They've talked about making the Chat tab be able to pop out chats etc. if they do this it will be much better. The screen share is easy, it's a button click not sure how you are having to navigate to have to share but Just used it, and it was simple :P.

As for Skype cut over, they said at a minimum a year out. So they have to get full feature functionality moved over before they are going to force the cut over. So this road map is around 6-9 months out, so most likely, next Ignite we will get getting the plans and road map in detail about the switch.

On old stuff you could right click and start a desktop share, now you double click someone to start a text message to a window that typically opens up behind another one and on which screen, then click the content share. Business is simple streamlined and focused, add call and IM to the GoToMeeting interface and you have it. As I said we had Slack and Teams up and running, neither gained acceptance due to being 'too much crap' where skype business took off due to the simpler smaller interface, which in my mind is often not right for productivity but still way better than the other two. I don't want 10K windows, I want to be able to communicate and share real time instead of walking to the other side of the building or picking up the phone. I'm sure if MS keeps in this direction someone else like GotoMeeting or other VoiP companies will offer what we are need.

Then your completely missing the purpose of Teams :P. The biggest problem with Online was the removal of Persistent chat from Skype for Business. Well Teams is that answer and then some. You still have the Chat tab which replicates Skype for Business fairly well. And you Don't HAVE to use the Teams tab, you can treat it as the Persistent chat tab from Skype for Business. I mean it's pretty similar TBH. The only thing missing IMO is popping out of Chats. Everything else is fairly similar to clicks / Tabs etc. just laid out differently.

Will be platform agnostic? By that I mean, will the Mac have the same features and functionality as the Windows client? Skype for Business on Mac was never on par with the Windows client, and that caused us to look elsewhere (a real disappointment to me). If they are going to be on a level playing field, I can start evangelizing the product again and maybe get us to switch.

A fantastic roadmap, I love this format, it's very accessible and will help clarify the news from Ignite. Thanks also for the corresponding Office 365 Roadmap updated today, with many new Teams items, great stuff.

Roll on Q2 2018... is this the preview release date or the actual live date??

This is great information about a product and the changes due in the next 6 months allowing us all to plan and manage what will be a significant change.

Thanks and please keep it up, maybe we will see the other Office 365 product managers doing the same which will allowing us to improve the coming change and therefore improve adoption by being able to evangelise the future with an increase certainty.

The features in the road map document I assume are dependant upon having an E5 subscription (or the equivalent in Q2-2018). I do not want to assume so ma asking if this is something that can be released or as a minimum added as a dependency.

I further assume that features specific to this subscription like Call transfer will be hidden if you do NOT have an appropriate subscription?

I would love to see an updated road map that identifies which of these features are dependant upon specific subscriptions as this is a question my leadership will ask as soon as I tell them of the new features and timetable.

Is there a plan to retire or integrate Yammer or it's features into Teams? It seems somewhat redundant having Team Chat/Skype/News Feed (SP). Given that SP on premises can be installed with News Feed / Yammer it would be great to make the next step - integrate online/on-premises with a 'Teams' for SP and O365.

Another thought. In asking IT friends and clients about 'Teams' their main lament is that there is no provision for inviting non-MS account holders to be added to 'chat'.

Several of these types of chatroom users I know have moved (or added) 'Slack' [https://slack.com/] to their services (or similar) given those types of services offer a free account for small / limited groups, have similar persistent chat features...but most importantly for them - they can invite anyone with an email account (albeit, NONE of the other great O365 features). I realise this can open up security/spam issues - but for many small businesses, or even charities/non-profits or clubs/families it works well and, at a fraction of the O365/user cost.

I realise that MS has to find the best mix for the best profit - but as they have found with Hotmail, a consumer level of 'free' can provide good exposure to a great tool that may later become a full-pay customer. In helping friends/families with IT I see where MS could promote some of these in the 'home' packages to solve home and small business issues that could increase brand loyalty. Just getting families to use a common 'family' calendar and persistent chat (for events, outings, etc.) and, including something like Teams chat and 'Planner' would be great. While MS has some great products it is the promotion with some that many of us see as lacking. There is a lot of hype and advertising around the 'Surface', but if it was linked to some sort of 'home office' / small business ads that gave short videos, testimonies, and instruction on how to best use them I think you'd also see a greater acceptance at 'work' for decision makers. While Google hang-outs / docs works fine for some, my kids and others forced to use them at school often find themselves exporting google docs to MS Office once home to do 'real' editing :) If folks could see/use services like (full or 'home' version) of Teams/Planner I think it would be very helpful to MS market share (and to clients just wanting something that does what they want.

Thanks for sharing! A lot of features here and a lot more to come! I like the integration between Skype and Teams, I think is the right step to be the new collaboration tool and still support the "old" S4B users

I agree with all of those impatient for the ability to chat to a wide array of account types. We've recently completed our migration into Office 365 in our Org. Previously, we made extensive use of Skype and S4B take-up has been relatively good (with the exception of Mac clients...). However we can't really use Teams because its external chat capability is poor. It's got to the point where we now have to consider purchasing a different product just to deal with this.

Would like to know if/when Teams will be included in the Office 365 Client Apps package for deployment to an organization. We're hesitating at rolling out the Teams app to everyone because of the RAM it hogs, slowing down some systems with less memory, but would like to have an idea when we will need to change our deployment method.

Agreed with the forced appdata install location. There are LOTS of organizations that are locking down the appdata folder from running .exe content, as it's an attack vector for ransomware. I'd prefer an install similar to SFB, a client I can push out to the machine, then any User can sign in. My two cents...

I partially agree with @John Gooding - My take is the new interface and functionality will be great, but we absolutely need an option for a "light" interface. I have users who will never use the full functionality of Teams and will only ever need a chat / calling interface similar to what is available today with the SfB client.

Existing on-premise customers that have upgraded from Lync 2013, to Skype for Business who are watching this probably really have one question. Forgetting all the Teams features for a moment. Will it have feature parity with our existing setup such as our Dial Plans, Response\Hunt Groups, Federation etc. That's all I think many of us are wondering right now.

Thanks - sounds like I should be reading up more on Skype for Business Server 2019. Thanks for that. I'll keep training our staff on Microsoft Teams, but will ease up on the "one day, this is your new phone" talk ;-)

I found this LINK and in it there is a statement "...Teams does not support 3rd-party Audio Conferencing Providers (ACPs)."

Here is my position:

I am upset with the tactic which forces us to use Microsoft Audio Conferencing for Teams PSTN dial in capabilities . With Skype for Business, I could integrate a 3rd party audio conference provider. All my existing conferencing numbers would work. The Global Network Architecture created for us could remain in place. No workflow changes to end/users.

In Teams, I will be forced to use the MS Audio Conferencing service if I want that PSTN dial in capability. This means new numbers at minimum. And gaps in Toll-Free or Local coverage.

Additionally, I fear the "all eggs in one basket" scenario that will put us in . For a global enterprise in 180 locations, we value diversity, in this case carrier diversity. One could conclude that if the Office365 service is unavailable, a large enterprise cannot conduct business. At least with separate carrier paths, either Teams failing or My 3rd party failing is not a lights out issue. Both failing simultaneously is unlikely.

I encourage you to voice your opinion on this with Microsoft. It is bad for us.

I highly doubt the conferencing bridge service and the actual Skype/Teams service are connected and one should work without the other, so all eggs in a basket really shouldn't be a fear. However, pricing of said bridge numbers per minute etc. could pose issues since there is a forced monopoly there :p.